Secrets that Simmer (9 page)

Tony’s eyes glowed a bright amber for just a moment, and That was the first time that Maggie truly recognized that she wasn’t dealing with someone who was wholly human. She had known that, of course, but it was the first time that she was seeing it. It terrified her, but also drew her in. Tony had a dark side. Everyone had a dark side. It was just his dark side that had something to do with the animal inside of him. A being that operated on instinct and emotion alone. He was right. It was something that she had seen in her work.

“I don’t understand how you can be an expert witness and defend that kind of behavior when you know that it’s wrong. I understand that things are happening that affect these shifters’ ability to deal with them, but when they go out and hurt someone else, they have to be held accountable for that,” Maggie argued. She refused to be moved by Tony’s theory. At least, not yet.

“Do you know the worst thing that you can do to a shifter is lock them in a small 8 x 8 cinderblock cell for twenty-three of twenty-four hours a day?” Tony asked. “The leaders of the various shifter clans have gone out of their way to downplay the fact that violence in prison populations that contain shifters has escalated over the last eighteen years. It’s a problem that is becoming an epidemic. That is why I take a cold eye to any of the cases that comes across my desk, and why I will advocate for shifters that I believe can be contributing members of society if just given a chance for proper treatment and rehabilitation.”

“That sounds like an idealistic view of the world,” Maggie said sarcastically.

“Perhaps, but the world as it exists today still isn’t fair and equitable for all of us. That was part of what the Urban Dwellers is all about.”

Maggie felt as if they were getting derailed. They had gotten into a philosophical argument that she thought they probably were not going to be able to compromise on. She needed to get him back on task.  There were a lot of other questions that she wanted ask him, though. She couldn’t help herself by asking the most obvious one.

“So did you all know back then that Kyle was the alpha?”

“That was a conversation for another day,” Tony said. It had only been recently announced that there was indeed an alpha in the Urban Dwellers organization. Of the three of them, Kyle was the least obvious choice, which of course had caused a media frenzy. He was attracting the same kind of attention as another alpha in another part of the country. For the time being, it appeared that Kyle Frost and Lukas Kasper were the ones who were going to dictate policy for the shifter world at large. It was something that she wanted to dig into, but she knew it wasn’t the right time. She had focus too.

“Okay. The first phase is difficult, and you lost your roommate. You watched it happen, and it was horrible. That had to have happened at least a couple of years before the night in question.” Maggie wasn’t unaccustomed to having to reel her witnesses back in.

“It happened in 1997. The reason that I’m telling you this is because that event with our roommate had a profound impact on me, and Kyle, and Eric. We had watched it happen right in front of us, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. We had the seeds of what would later become the Urban Dwellers organization all the way back then. We talked about what we would do differently if we were in charge. That was a pretty big deal when you consider that we were all from different clans. I’m a wolf shifter, Eric’s a panther shifter, and Kyle’s a bear shifter. It would be unprecedented for all of us to come together as one unit, but That was part of why we did it. What we wanted to build and create wouldn’t be the same as the old establishment. We were excited about the future.”

Maggie decided to let Tony get it all out. She had a sense that he wanted her to understand how important this was to them even all the way back then. She had heard some of this in various bits and pieces that had been in the media. It was always served up in a very polished way. Hearing the raw cut of it was different. She had admiration for Tony’s passion. She could see why people would follow him. He had a commanding presence.

“October 23, 1999,” she reminded him. “I imagine the day of shifter independence was a big day for you guys then with all your big plans.”

Tony began to pace the room. It was clear they were getting to the crux of the issue, and he was growing more and more agitated by the moment. He loosened his tie and removed his jacket. He started to roll up his sleeves. It seemed as if he was doing everything to try and make himself comfortable, in what was probably the most uncomfortable situation he had ever been in.

“We had a heads up that it was going to happen, because my father had hinted at it. He knew that it was going up for a vote, and he knew that it was going to pass. He told me in a text message that morning to be ready. So, I knew that there would be a reason to celebrate. We had been planning it for weeks. It was just a matter of when the day arrived so we could pull the trigger on it.”

Maggie was starting to see a youthful exuberance in Tony’s step. He was reeling back through time and starting to relive that day as if it was happening now. She had seen this kind of phenomenon with witnesses before. It was a way for them to detach themselves from present reality while still distancing themselves from the past. That was what told her that what Tony was going to tell her was probably even more dramatic to him than what had happened with Robert Calhoun.

“So what did you guys have planned?”

Tony did not stop his pacing. She wondered if he was going to wear a path into the floor. He didn’t look at her then. “We were going to cut classes after the morning classes. We figured the announcement would come out about that time., and we were fine with taking detention. We were all straight A students, and nobody expected us to get into any trouble. So when the media release came out, we gathered with everybody else in the great hall to watch the announcement on the big screen TV. It was so loud in the room. It was amazing. Everybody was hooting and hollering and hugging each other. Girls were screaming and crying, and the teachers were standing off to the side giving each other handshakes and slaps on the back. It was like we had won a massive fight, and, in a way, we had. We had the same equal rights that humans did. We could be free to be ourselves. We didn’t have to hide anymore, even though we all understood that it was going to be a hard transition. After the president spoke, I remember Markus Kasper came up to the podium to speak.”

Markus Kasper was Lukas Kasper’s brother and had been the Greyelf Grizzly’s alpha at the time. He had been a kind of national spokesperson for the shifter community, and had led the charge and the bill that had gotten the shifter equality legislation passed. Maggie remembered seeing him speak on TV herself that day, but she was trying to keep herself distanced from her own memories.

“He talked about caution. He talked about balance.” Those were the themes that Maggie remembered.

“Yes, those were the things that he talked about. But we were eighteen years old, and we were young, dumb kids. There was no balance in our world. We had an idea that we were going to try and drink ourselves into oblivion. We were planning to go out to the quarry, sneak some liquor that we had stolen from one of the teacher’s stash in the staff lounge, and have a bonfire while dancing and swimming in the quarry. It was going to be a night of celebration, and if we got caught, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. We were willing to take whatever punishment got dished out to us.”

“So far, I’m not hearing anything that would make any sense as to why you think you guys got in trouble that night.”

“That was the thing. Classes were canceled. We snuck the liquor out. We got into our car. We headed towards the quarry. And That was the last thing I remember until we woke up at dawn.”

“What you mean? Did you go to the quarry? Who was there with you?” Maggie looked up from the notes she was furiously scribbling on her pad.

“I don’t know. That was the thing about all of this, Maggie. I lost twelve hours. There’s nothing but a black hole there.”

“What did Eric and Kyle say happened?”

“They don’t remember either. We all woke up, and we couldn’t remember anything. It was like it was erased.” Tony sighed heavily.

“Okay, if you guys went to the quarry but are experiencing some kind of mass amnesia, why is there a police report of a potential murder? What do you think happened?”

“You remember I told you about what happened with Robert Calhoun? About what happened that night that he phased for the first time?”

Maggie started to feel a tendril of dread in her stomach. “Yes.”

“I told you about the blood.”

“Yes.”

“Well, if I was to compare the two scenes, I would say that it was Robert Calhoun times a hundred.”

Maggie felt queasy. “What did you see when you woke up?”

“Blood.” Tony’s eyes were unfocused as they stared at her. He was back there at that time. He looked down at his hands. “I was in a half phase. My hands were still paws. There was blood matted in all of my fur. I could taste blood in my mouth. I thought that maybe I had eaten some kind of raw meat. It wasn’t crazy to end up hunting in your animal form. I didn’t remember arriving at the quarry, but as I looked around I recognized That was where I was. And then I saw Eric and Kyle were there too. They were just starting to wake up themselves and were in the same half phased form that I was. They were covered in blood too. We phased back to our full human forms, and then we started to look around. We found pieces of clothing, torn and shredded, that wasn’t ours. We were in a kind of campsite. There was a fresh, burned out bonfire. There was a tent set off to the side that was ripped open in several places. It wasn’t any of our camping equipment. We asked ourselves what had happened, but there was no way to know. None of us could remember anything.”

Maggie could imagine what it would have been like for three teenage boys to wake up covered in blood. But if they had attacked someone, it should have all been in the police report. As it was, the report only noted that it a possible homicide scene had been called in.

“I still don’t understand why the report was redacted. What happened?”

“We did the only thing we could think of. Kyle called his dad. His dad told us to stay put and not to leave the quarry. He said that he would handle it. I swear it was barely thirty minutes later he showed up in a helicopter with Eric’s dad and my dad. They looked around and swore us to never say anything about what happened there.”

“Who are the campers? What happened to them? The report said the bodies were never found.”

Tony crossed the room. He set his glass down on the fireplace hearth and pulled on the picture on the wall. It came off easily and revealed a safe behind it. Tony spun the dial back and forth entering the combination. Then he opened the safe and looked inside. He drew out a small manila envelope. He crossed the room and tossed it onto the table in front of Maggie. “I don’t know where that report you received came from. As far as I knew, it never existed. We never called the cops, and we definitely didn’t talk to any of them. You want to know about the campers, though. Well, here’s what I know.”

Maggie slowly opened the envelope. There was only one sheet of paper inside of it. It was a photocopy of three driver’s licenses. They were IDs of young women that she could see were about the same age as Eric, Kyle, and Tony had been at the time of the incident. She looked up at him again quizzically. “So what happened to them?”

Tony looked at her. His voice was so low that she barely even heard him. “The only thing they can think of is that we ate them.”

During his confession, Maggie had moved from her chair to the couch. He had watched her as he told her his story. She was thoroughly engrossed in it even as she jotted down notes on her notepad.

After he reached the end, Tony tried to sit down beside her, but Maggie scooted as far away from him as she could. She looked at him with an expression that he was sure was akin to horror.

“What do you mean you ate them?”

It had been a full minute since he had stopped talking. He had given her time to process what he had said. “It’s not something That was done. Shifters aren’t cannibals. I’ve studied the issue for years, just to be sure. Please, don’t look at me like that,” Tony said. He wanted to touch her and soothe the anxiety that he felt wafting off her body.

“How can I not look at you like that? You basically just told me that you ate a girl when you were eighteen-years-old.”

“First of all, we don’t know what really happened that night. It was a theory that seemed to fit the scene, and there wasn’t any way we could disprove it. But I’ve had a long time to sit with this, Maggie, and I know who I am as a person. Kyle’s tried to deal with psychological trauma from it over the years, and I’d say it’s a big reason why Eric is such an asshole. But I was always the one who took the logical, scientific route. I knew there had to be another answer. That wasn’t who we were. Not with all of the dreams that we had for an integrated world between shifters and humans. I would never hurt someone like that.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Maggie said. All of the color was gone from her face. She stood up. “I think I need to go.”

“Don’t go. Stay,” he asked quietly. He wouldn’t beg.

Maggie stood up. “I can’t stay. I can’t stay and look at you and think about the fact that you ate a human being.”

“Like I said, That was never been proven.”

“Then where are the bodies?”

“If you want my theory, it’s this. I think that we were framed, Maggie.” Tony gripped her shoulders. He needed her to believe him.

Maggie was mesmerized by the intensity of his stare. She was still trying to process everything that he had told her.

“We were framed, Maggie,” he repeated, as if he was trying to drill it into her head. “If anything, it is proven by the fact that you are here asking me these questions. It has to be that. Someone tried to take us down back then. Someone tried to interfere with our lives, and it didn’t work because our fathers were too powerful. They made it all disappear. But whoever wanted to fuck with us is back now. That person sent you that report because they wanted you to start asking questions. What else could it mean?”

“I think it means that someone out there wants justice for what happened to those girls,” Maggie said stoically. She refused to let Tony’s fervent plea sway her from her mission. “Please, let me go.”

Tony released her shoulders. He took a step back. She could see his chest heaving with frustration. He seemed to be having a difficult time reining his emotions in, but her words seemed to have had the desired effect. “I’m not keeping you here against your will. I would never do that.”

“Good,” Maggie replied. In her mind, there wasn’t anything else to say until she had time to sort out everything she had heard.

She grabbed her coat and her briefcase. She headed toward the door as fast as her feet would take her. She thought she had been ready to deal with whatever she’d find out, but she had been wrong. She felt like she needed to go to sleep and not wake up for ten years.

Tony’s voice followed her out the door. “Remember counselor, you’re under contract. This stays between you and me.”

As if Maggie could forget.

She made her way home as quickly as she could. She felt invisible eyes watching her everywhere she went. When she was back safely inside her apartment, she gave a sigh of relief. Her cat came over and wove between her legs looking for attention. She tapped the top of his head, but couldn’t quite give in to touching him yet. She had to admit that that was like one of her worst nightmares. That she would die in her sleep, and her cat would eat her. It seemed impossible that that was what happened with Tony.

She gathered up her mail, and That was when she saw the envelope sitting there on top. It was written in the same ugly scrawl of the first envelope that she had received. Her mysterious, anonymous source was making him or herself known yet again. She picked up the envelope cautiously.

The fact of the matter was she sat on a different side of the fence now. She had signed Tony’s contract. She was committed to being his attorney now. And what would his attorney do? His attorney would follow the facts to find out the truth, and then make sure that whatever that truth was, it couldn’t come up again to harm her client.

She thought about the entire evening. She thought about everything that she knew about Tony. She had been watching his videos and reading his press in the time leading up to her initial confrontation with him. That was a different man than she had been with in his apartment that night.

She started to work it out like it was a jigsaw puzzle. She sat down on her couch, and instead of passing out as she expected, she pulled out her notebook pad and started to make notes of everything she knew. As she suspected, the puzzle pieces just didn’t quite fit together right. She pulled out the file with the redacted police report. She read through it again with a critical eye.

It mentioned a crime scene. Three adolescent males. A possible homicide but no bodies. All facts that Tony had told her. So, there wasn’t anything that necessarily said he had done anything wrong. The fact that he and his friends had apparently experienced complete amnesia about the evening was highly inconvenient and was part of what she scrawled in her notes. She started to make a list of all of her questions. That was what Maggie did. She approached it like it was truly her case. Except instead of sitting on the prosecution side, she was at the defendant table.

This went on until well into the wee hours of the morning. When she finally put her pen down, she felt like she had a grasp and a handle on the situation, tenuous and serious as it was. She had an initial timeline of the day based on Tony’s confession. She had questions about that, though. She felt that she was going to need to speak to both Eric and Kyle, if they were willing. She figured they probably would not be.

Through all of it, Maggie had made a decision. She wanted to know if Tony was guilty or innocent, and it wasn’t just professional curiosity. Something inside of her wanted to know personally as well.

But, to do that, she needed to follow the facts, and that was what she was going to do. Her client needed her to have the benefit of the doubt until he was proven guilty. Hell, even if he was guilty, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. If the matter ever came up, she would be probably the one required to defend him in court. It was an uncomfortable situation for her, but her calculating brain listed the pros and the cons of it.

She wasn’t sure which column to classify the fact that she was attracted to her client. Was she wearing rose colored glasses when it came to his possible innocence or guilt? She didn’t know. That was why she had to follow the facts. Now, she felt ready to look at what her mysterious, anonymous source had sent to her. She didn’t know if this would be something that would prove Tony’s guilt or render him innocent.

He had been there that night with Eric and Kyle. It was possible that Tony had done nothing wrong, even if something had happened to lay blame at their feet. If anything had happened to the three women, it could have easily been one or both of the other men who had done it. This was something that she wanted to hang her hat on. She didn’t want to believe that Tony was guilty. She wanted to believe that he was innocent.

She put the envelope on her lap. She studied it. Then she got out her phone, and she took a picture of both the front and the back. There was a part of her that was tempted to send it off for fingerprint analysis. She remembered that she didn’t have access to do that anymore. But then she thought about it again. She carefully stood up and the envelope fell to the floor. She went into the kitchen and got rubber gloves. She came back into the living room and looked at the envelope again. She had a plastic bag in her hand. She had a feeling that if she asked Tony to find out if there were any fingerprints on it, he would be able to do that. It seemed the Urban Dwellers had endless types of resources.

It was awkward as she tried opening the envelope with the gloves on. She wanted to make sure that she didn’t rip any part of what was inside. When she finally grappled it open, she slid the contents out onto her coffee table. She gasped in surprise. There were three pictures. Three pictures of three different girls. She had a sinking suspicion that if she compared the pictures to the driver’s licenses that Tony had in his safe, they would match.

Her anonymous source wanted her to find these girls. She was sure now that this was the message being sent. She was going to have to go back to the beginning. She was going to have to see if there was something here and if these girls were possibly somehow miraculously still alive.

That was one of the things that she had noted in her list of questions. Since there weren’t any bodies, it was possible that the girls had been there but had wandered away or been taken from the scene. She had no kind of analysis as far as the blood that had been found. Tony hadn’t offered up if it was his blood, Eric’s blood, Kyle’s blood, or anybody else’s blood. She figured surely someone there, even if it hadn’t been the police, had taken the evidence into custody. She needed to figure out where that was. She was going to build a case, even if it never went to trial. She was going to find the answer to the question.

Did Tony Atwood kill a woman on the night of October 23, 1999?

She wrote the question at the top of her legal pad. Now, she knew that it was time for her to sleep. Her body was exhausted, and her mind even more so. But she felt more settled than she had when she had arrived home. She fell asleep on the couch and had dreams drenched in red.

It was a knock at her door that woke her up several hours later. She stared into the sunlight of the rays of the morning sun. She could tell by its position that she had slept far later than she intended. Then she remembered what had woken her up. It was a knock on the door. She smoothed her hair as she got up off of the couch. “Just a minute.”

She was halfway to the door when she realized the potential error of her thought process. Her building, low rent and dilapidated as it was, had a secure entryway. It wouldn’t be possible for someone to get into her building. At least, not without being buzzed in. Someone could have knocked on her door in error. She supposed that could be the case, but she was still cautious as she approached the door. She pushed up on her tiptoes as she looked out the peephole. She couldn’t see anyone outside. She took a step back from the door.

Then she remembered something. She went back to her living room. She found the envelope in the plastic bag. What she was looking for was something that her drunken, exhausted mind had missed. It was the fact that there was no postage mark in the top right corner of the envelope. This had not come to her in the mail. This had been delivered straight to her mailbox.

Now Maggie was terrified. Why had this random anonymous person decided she was the one who needed to receive this information? It had to be because of the publicity around her name in the media when it came to shifter cases. She wondered what that person would think when they realized that she had inadvertently climbed into bed with the enemy.

Maggie made her way back to the door. She slowly opened it with the chain still on it and looked out through the open slit. She didn’t see anyone in the hallway. She unlocked the chain and opened the door further. That was when she saw the delivery on her doormat. It was a single black rose.

“I don’t know who it came from,” she repeated to Tony an hour later. He was sitting in her living room. As if she thought she’d ever see the day. He was huge. Maggie’s apartment was barely 700 square feet. With Tony in it, it felt like he took up the entire space. He had been the first person that she could think of calling when she realized that she might be a target for something far more sinister than she realized.

“Okay. So you got a package delivered to your office. Then last night you came home, you found the envelope in the mail with these pictures. This morning, you discovered the black rose on your doormat.”

“Thanks for the play by play, but I’m well aware of the facts, Tony. I’m the one who is the prosecutor here.” Maggie had a throbbing headache that had started the moment she spied the rose. Tony’s intense line of questioning was driving her nuts.

“You’re sure that this wouldn’t be from some ex-boyfriend or jilted admirer?”

“I think the timing is just a bit of a stretch of a coincidence, don’t you?” Maggie asked. She knew in her gut that the person who had sent the two envelopes was the same person who had left the rose on her doormat. She just didn’t understand what the meaning was behind it. Was it a threat or was it something else?

“Black roses would indicate some kind of affection that was unrequited,” Tony said thoughtfully.

“Can you stop trying to psychoanalyze the situation for a minute, please? I’m being threatened here. I don’t understand why I’ve been targeted to be the one involved in all of this.” Maggie was near hysterics now. Two days ago she had a great job, she had everything that she could really want in life outside of perhaps a relationship. Even that was something that she felt like would come eventually. She was successful, and she was on the way up. Now she felt everything had been torn apart around her, and it all started and ended with the man sitting across from her. She was pissed off.